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Fire destroyed Vinnay's friend's house on Christmas. He lost everything. To make matters worse, he was laid off from a long time job 2 weeks ago.

Even just a small donation will help. Go to the blog that Vinnay put together at HelpJeffOut and make a donation.

From Vinnay's blog:

"A friend of mine, Jeff, has had an unfortunate Christmas. His home was destroyed by a fire on christmas morning and declared a total loss. Fortunately, he was not home at the time and no one was hurt, but he did lose his cat Maurice, along with all of his possessions. The fire was started in his tenants apartment, and quickly spread throughout the house. To make matters worse, he was just laid off from his long time manufacturing job.

Jeff is a home game poker player, and reader of many of your blogs. He is a RPG'er, and beer drinker. He is a hard-working fucker who has battled dyslexia his whole life. He's a toker, and he only has one ball. He's a flyers fan (I guess I can forgive him for that). He's one of the most generous people I know. And he needs some help.

We have set up a site to help raise some money for him to help get him back on his feet. If you can give that would be great, but please do me a favor and link up the site for me.

It looks like pokerstars is in beta testing with a pin number (input by clicking on numbers with the mouse) and a RSA security token (a USB key that has to be attached to your computer to play). Pretty Awesome!!!

This is great news and should dramatically reduce the amount of hacking. Hopefully, FTP will follow suit or is currently working on similar security.

It looks like you will have the option of using the pin or the rsa token, so it probably won't cause a wait for new or casual users.

One of the beta testers has posted his initial thoughts in a 2+2 thread (link to thread).

Quote from the thread:

"FWIW I first thought the PIN would be useless. Then when I tried it and realized the numbers are in a different order each time, I changed my mind... this is total protection from keyloggers as long as your email password is secure (and you don't type it... I realize some people do, such as those who use webmail accounts rather than pop3).

Anyone that can get at your email can still get your PIN no problem if they have your password. But as long as your email password is different from your pokerstars password, this does protect you from all kinda of Phishing... plus if you use the same password for Stars as you do for something else and that password database is poorly protected or just a straight-out scam, this would save you.

I know a few people who went to 'poker forums' linked to via AIM chat with hackers... they then promptly created accounts, with the same username/password they use for stars, giving the hacker their login info. This would stop that, as well as a few other things.

I'm going to be a RSA Token user myself, but we'll have to wait a bit longer for that."

I posted some goals for Nov 19 - Dec 31 on Nov 19th. It mostly focused around limit holdem. I was feeling good about the game and after a really good run (around $1.60/hand over 10k+ hands), I felt like it was the game for me. Now, I'm not so sure. Maybe, it is just running bad (with a little bit of tilt mixed back in). I'm not sure. I'm still up at LHE but have given back around 2/3rds of what I won. It isn't fun and I'm thinking that I was just running extremely well at the beginning. The downswings in limit can be brutal, depsite the fact that it is LIMIT.

The good news is I turned a lot of my pokerstars FPPs into cash and am on the positive side of the MTTs.

So, I'm giving up the goals I set. I'm not really sure why I ever set number of hands type goals. I think it forces me to play when I normally wouldn't.

I'm not off track, but feel like I need to get back on track. (Not sure if that makes sense, but I am always hard on myself when I feel like I am playing below my capabilities.) I have taken quite a big break from NLHE and I think I am missing it. I'll probably screw around with some tourneys and cash games over the next few days before deciding where to focus next.

I was scanning the tourneys on pokerstars and saw that the $109 HORSE tourney with a $5k guarantee only had 25 people registered and was about to start. I decided to give it a shot and wound up winning the thing 3 1/2 hours later.

It was $2,250 for 1st thanks to the $1,800 overlay. Weeeeee!!!!

I wound up winning it heads up because my opponent didn't seem comfortable with heads up LHE. He was using his entire time bank on every street eagerly hoping the O8 round would get there. All the while I was eating away at his stack and finished him off in the 2nd hand of O8.

I'll make this a quick update since I've got a busy day in front of me.Goal Update (11/19 - 12/31)

1. Play 30k hands of LHE

I ran pretty bad since the last update. I am sitting at -$1,200 over almost 6k hands. The biggest losses came from a couple of bad 30/60 LHE sessions where I mainly had 2nd best hands and lost one big pot (capped on every street except river) to a guy chasing a flush and hitting vs. my set.

I'll probably stick with 5/10 and 10/20 for a little while and see how things go.

2. Play my PCA step tickets

I have played several step tourneys and am down to one Step 2 ticket and one Step 3 ticket.

3. Make an attempt to play at least one PCA super sat.

I haven't play one yet. I am going to try to satellite into the $650 sat on Sunday. (last shot for me)

4. Play at least 15 MTTs and maintain a positive ROI.

I think I played 1 or 2 and didn't cash in either. I'll check before the next update.

Good News

The last week wasn't all bad. I was able to turn around 40k pokerstar FPPs into around $2k by playing the 5,400 FPP Sunday Million sats. I then used the T$ to play the double or nothing sngs.